Kind of an Italian version of those great old Kharis the Mummy movies, this is pretty dull for long stretches, even with the bombastic narration telling us what's going on. On the other hand, it does have a neat, actual, no-nonsense Monster and we get to see it in action a couple of times (rather than just for a few minutes at the very end). Instead of a dried-out bandaged Egyptian, here we're dealing with the re-animated corpse of an ancient Etruscan gladiator Quintillus. He keeps coming back to sort-of-life to chase after his reincarnated girlfriend.

But because he was killed in the eruption of Pompeii, Quintillus is caked in a shell of crusty volcanic ash that somehow is flexible enough to let him move but still hard as rock when people shoot at him. When Quintillus smacks people with those stone mitts, they go down! (A career in boxing would be a cinch.) In his mind, he's reliving the ancient disaster and desperately trying to find his sweetie so he can carry her into the ocean to escape the eruption. This gives him a motive we can sympathize with; the best monsters always have their own point of view that's not just sheer evil for its own sake. The modern woman he's fixated on understandably objects to be carried around like that, scientists and police get caught up in the agita and the results are enjoyable in a low-key, 1950s drive-in way. One distinctive note is that no one comes up with a way to stop Quintillus, no one says, "That's it! We need to freeze him!" or "Wait a minute, he's vulnerable to bright light!" Nope, the Faceless Man just walks over everyone and actually makes it to the sea with the girl in his arms... of course, then he finds out how mud is made.

Edward L Cahn directed this and a passel of other great cheesy drive-in flicks, including IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE, INVASION OF THE SAUCERMEN, CREATURE WITH THE ATOM BRAIN and INVISIBLE INVADERS. He knew what we wanted to see through the windshield. (Well, nudity to be honest but he couldn't deliver that.)

Anne Simmons' cover for the October 2000 issue of COMIC BOOK ARTIST

From the early 1960s....

Here's another page from the album THORGAL: THE ARCHERS by Jean Van Hamme and Grzegorz Rosinki. I posted a sequence recently showing a tense archery contest, but this page relates to still earlier entry about super-hero Green Arrow and his gimmicky arsenal.

One thing that occurs to me is that the rope-cutting head is not really intended for slicing through a single rope, as when someone is being hanged and you want to rescue him. No, most likely it was meant to be fired as a volley by several archers at the lines holding up the sails of a ship. (Of course, if a few of these did happen to connect with an enemy seaman, some vicious wounds would be inflicted as a side benefit.)

Here's a chart showing the various wounds and injuuries that Tom Mix was supposed to have survived during his lifetime. His studio biography made it sound like he had the most adventurous life in history, making Indiana Jones look like Percy Dovetonsils. Even the most cursory investigation deflates most of the exciting exploits attributed to him, and I think we can safely say that Mix never suffered most of those inflictions.



Tom Mix was a huge star in his day. As I understand it, Bronco Billy Anderson was the first actual cowboy hero in films, and then William S Hart. But Mix added the flamboyance and energy that made his movies snap like firecrackers. He had showmanship, he knew how to make leaping on a horse or throwing a punch the dramatic event it should be in adventure flicks. He also had a radio show about but he was played by another actor. Here's my drift. "Tom Mix" can be see as a fictional character from the start, even though he was portrayed by the actual Tom Mix.

( tarnation )

You have to take almost everything about actors' lives with a suitcase full of salt. From date of birth to ancestry to earlier marriages, none of it can be accepted at face value. Maybe it's appropriate that people whose trade is pretending to other people are not what they themselves seem to be. Probably quite a few young fans were disillusioned at some point when it sank in that Tom Mix was not "Tom Mix." I've been let down myself by some of my heroes, but you eventually realize that even the best humans are just humans. Warts and all, so to speak.

I'm okay with Fleetwood Mac, they've never been among my favorite groups but they're all right. RUMOURS in particular has some songs dealing with emotional situations that we all have found ourselves trying to understand, and it's always helpful to hear that others have been through the same gantlets of the heart. One of the singers for Fleetwood Mac way back in the day was a young woman named Stevie Nicks. She had a distinctive voice with a kind of edge to it; I don't know what the technical word is, but Dolly Parton has this quality even more pronouncedly. If it wasn't ungallant, this might be described as a sort of goatlike or sheeplike effect.

Stevie was a lovely little thing, not much over five feet tall (which explains the platform shoes even Frankenstein's Monster would find awkward, and the stovepipe hat. In contrast to singers like, say Pat Benatar (who seemed enraged in every song she did), Stevie Nicks showed an ethereal sort of presence on stage.. a lot of twirling in lace, very feminine in the classic sense. In particular, the song "Rhiannon" fit her visual image and her vocal qualities with mystic lyrics. In her heyday, Nicks redirected the bloodflow in many many thousands of young men to a localized area.

( Nix, Nicks )


I like to post mostly my own scans, trying to add to images available in the ether, but here are a few that I swiped:

( more Stevie )






And, rather than put up a link to the singer herself performing, here is an insolent song from the Rotters, immortalized on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKtASyCinfc

Oh, what the heck, here's Stevie in 1976 doing "Rhiannon"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=py3w5fttedA

I mean, why not?

One of the first things you learn in life is that you can't smoke a cigarette underwater! I don't care how clever a fish you are.

This cover is from April 1962, a tie-in to a children's show that featured a deepsea diver trying to cope with a lost sea populated by talking fish and ruled by a beautiful mermaid. Adventures like these are usually a sign of "rapture of the deep" and a good reason why you should watch your oxygen level carefully. No, actually DIVER DAN was an innocuous show aimed at very small children, and it has a certain naive charrm when you're watching an episode today. Here is the obligatory YouTube clip

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLKAmodyVrA

See, if this show turned up in a comic written by Alan Moore or Grant Morrison or one of those deconstructionist guys, Dan would be lured into removing his helmet at a promise of magically getting to be with the beautiful mermaid. At which point he would drown and she would cackle while turning into a horrid hag, revealing a pile of old diver suits behind her.

This chap was famous in his days as

1) Host of a health and exercise show
2) Scandalous playboy of a European royal family
3) Star of "stag reels" such as THE HOUSEWIFE'S PRAYER
4) Voice of countless commercials for the Ajax White Knight, Marlboro cigarettes and more
5) None of them things, see.

This page made me chuckle. It's from September 1958, this first issue of COSMO, THE MERRY MARTIAN. This was a pleasant, low-key comic from the Archie people. Here, we see our two accident-prone Martian explorers have landed on the Moon a bit more dramatically than they intended.



What caught my eye was the familiar way the Moonmen are drawn, particularly the ones in the first panel... the ones looking over the crashed ship. The artist seems to be drawing on memories from a decade back of "Chad." This was a little sketch of a rounded-headed face looking over a wall, with hands holding on and a long nose hanging down over the wall. It was a WW II gag that people drew on convenient surfaces to protest various shortages. ("What! No beer?" or "Wot, no coffee?"). In the States, this same drawing came to be known as Kilroy and was infamous for turning up in inaccessible or unlikely spots. Thus, a group of Marines taking a Japanese-held island would find (to their amusement and perplexity), this same drawing and the note, "Kilroy was here." Kilroy became one of those weird little bits of folklore from the war years.

Still, Chad or Kilroy... it's nice to know the little guy made it to the Moon.

Visiting us from that wonderful year 1936. Not a young Marlin Perkins.

The back cover to ZAP# 0, from 1967. Yes, Robert Crumb dredges up those childhood traumas of helpless rage against adult tyranny. That's okay. When many of us hit middle age, we spend time and money rebuilding those collections.

Video games are ruining our kids, you may hear, but before that, it was comics which ruined our kids and before that, pulps. Before that, Penny Dreadfuls. Before that, I dunno-- I guess kids worked at farm chores as soon as they were big enough and mostly couldn't read anyway. And I imagine in another generation, some sort of signal will trigger the pleasure center of the brain or artificial memories will be implanted (for a fee, and for a limited time only, so you have to renew them). And that will be corrupting our kids. The more things change..

Here's a little paradox about the 1961 Hammer film CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF. Most of the publicity stills seem to show Oliver Reed in his full furred-up Leon rig attacking Yvonne Romain. These are dramatic scenes. She was an attractive woman in the full-bloomed Hammer starlet tradition and Reed was quite an impressive werewolf. He looks as if he could tackle both Larry Talbot and Dr Glendon at the same time. Yet, oddly, the character played by Yvonne Romain was the mother of Leon, and she died giving birth to him. So if you went to see this film and expected to see these scenes, it might dawn on you that they couldn't possibly be in the movie.


( carrying the fainted damsel, a monster tradition )

This scene in fact was used in the advertising posters and newspaper ads. My guess is that shooting was done (as usual in movies) out of sequence for expediency. Maybe Romain shot her scenes close to the time that Reed would be doing his ragin' werewolf sequence, and the studio figured it was a good chance to do some publicity photos.


( how you've grown! )

CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF was one of my favorite Hammer films. Despite the fact that the title beast isn't seen in all his glory until the very end, the build-up explaining how Leon came to this sad situation is compelling enough to keep your attention. And Oliver Reed, with his sullen good looks, is perfect casting. There's something a bit feral about his expressions in any case. I only have this movie on an old VHS tape recorded off Turner Classic Movies ages ago. It has likely degraded to unwatchable reddish murk by now, but if I pick up a DVD of this movie, I'll do fuller coverage with some screen captures.

Yikes. I can just imagine what happens to the bright young energetic advertising executive who tries to place this ad in a magazine today.



A friend of mine observed, not entirely seriously, that America's obesity problem really took off when the crackdown on cigarette smoking began. "You're suggesting that everyone take up smoking again so the population loses weight?" I asked, and she shrugged, "Worth a try." But then, she also thinks marriage licenses need to be renewed every four years with both parties signing or the union dissolves. It would save a lot of court time in divorce cases.

Two covers to a short-lived pulp from 1940 and 1941. Judging by the contents list, a short novel each issue was supplemented by several articles about the danger of German and Japanese spies blowing up bridges and dams, poisoning reservoirs and that sort of thing in war most Americans could see us getting involved in soon.



Over the years, I've done some research (in my usual disorganized and easily-distrated way) into why there seems to have been so little sabotage carried out in the United States during the way. Part of this may have been the sheer physical isolation of the country, what with an ocean on either side in an era where long-distance transportation was not as common or quick as it is today. Having Canada and Mexico as friendly buffers to the north and south also helped. Japanese agents would have faced considerable difficulties, just by being conspicuous in their appearance. (All those Americans of Japanese descent locked away in camps on the West Coast made the remaining Asians stand out even more, and most Americans then couldn't really distinguish between Japanese or Chinese or Koreans at all.) German-Americans were treated much more leniently, to no one's surprise. Aside from the racial aspect, they were such a huge percentage of the general population. Still, cities with large numbers of recent German immigrants were watched and there was a general suspicion of anyone with an accent. (I saw a remark by Archie in a Nero Wolfe story from this time that he "naturally" disliked someone because they sounded like they had just arrived from Germany and this puzzled me as a kid.)



An awful lot of pulp and comics stories dealt with attempts to blow up the Panama Canal and industries vital to war production. It provided a quick understandable activity for the bad guys to be plotting, and it was sure to make readers cheer when Doc Savage or Captain America stopped the saboteurs at the last second. Yet I find very few examples in history texts of actual attempts by either Axis agents or sympathizers to carry out these attacks. Maybe the FBI and Army Intelligence was on the ball, catching attempts early on. Or possibly the German and Japanese governments just found it too difficult to accomplish anything, given the distances involved. I don't think we can credit it all to Spy Smasher.

What IS it about THE TWILIGHT ZONE that haunts our collective memories so? Maybe because almost everyone saw it at an early, impressionable age? Because it drew on the best stories from old time radio and writers like Charles Beaumont or Richard Matheson? Or, maybe, because Rod Serling knew what he was doing and was like the vaudeville comedian who knew from long experience just how to pace a joke and hit the punchline? For whatever reasons, when I ask someone if they were ever frightened by a TV show, they're likely to answer, "Oh, yes, that one with the gremlin on the wing of the plane," or "The old lady alone in the house with these little robots trying to kill her," or "the one with the Devil locked up in the monastery.." Even if they haven't seen the show in many years, somehow it still haunts them.




On the left is Inger Stevens at the age of twenty, a good example of Sweden producing good-looking people. Man. On the right, she's seen with Rod Serling. Is it just me, or does he always seem so tense and worried, like a chain-smoker with an ulcer? Every time I see him in his little intros to TWILIGHT ZONE episodes, he looks uptight and ready to snap. Anyway, the very first season of THE TWILIGHT ZONE (and don't ask if I mean the original series, don't get me started grrrr), featured "The Hitchhiker." A young woman named Nan is driving cross-country and, after narrowly missing a serious accident, starts to see a seedy-looking hitchhiker turning up and asking, "Going my way?" No matter how fast or how far she drives, he shows up. Nan freaks out and thinks the guy is planning to kill her but (of course) the answer is much stranger than that.

( more Swedish beauty )

When you see Inger Stevens mentioned at all, it's either for her 1960s tame sitcom THE FARMER'S DAUGHTER or about her suspicious death at the age of thirty-five (evidently suicide, but there are always rumors about any celebrity who ever died). If you see her on cable TV, it's almost certainly opposite Clint Eastwood in HANG 'EM HIGH, a Hollywood version of the Spaghetti Westerns (not a bad film). She was in quite a few other movies and TV appearances. I wouldn't mind seeing MADIGAN again, for example. But in the dark corners of my imagination, I will always see her in 1960, behind the wheel of that car and looking in the rearview mirror as she realizes her fate...

Hey, you! Yeah, you. What's so damn funny, pal?



Heh. Actually, after the success of THE DARK KNIGHT, I imagine most people will react to this ghoul with the remark, "Why... so... serious?" This is from the 1961 movie MR SARDONICUS, a wicked little chiller from the one and only William Castle. It was a lot of fun in its own right, but the Ray Russell story it was based on was even better.


( Review of the Ray Russell story )

This alarming vignette is from Lloyd Dangle's "Lucky To Be Alive," a rumination on notorious serial killer Ted Bundy. It appeared in BLAB!# 5, Summer 1990. Now, any way you look at it, BLAB! was an odd little publication. Edited by Monte Beauchamp, it was a digest-sized magazine packed with art and reminiscences from various underground artists. The first issue was a tribute to EC Comics, but this fifth issue was all about true crime and serial killers. To be honest, it scared me more than all the horror movies and pulps I've read over the decades.



A quick look at Snopes leads you to conclude that this story, taken from a 1989 interview with Debbie Harry, is apocryphal. Ted Bundy was never known to operate in New York City. Possibly the story was an example of Debbie Harry's dark sense of humor (I get the impression from various interviews that she has a sharp and mordant mind). But what's even more alarming... If this did happen to her, and it couldn't have been Ted Bundy driving this tricked-up MurderMobile, then who was it? What killer was out there, never to be identified or caught? (brrr)

Beforfe SILENCE OF THE LAMBS came out, I happened to rent an earlier movie called MANHUNTER with Brian COx as Hannibal Lector. This led me to buy a few books on criminal profilers and true life serial killers, but I soon after sold off the books and didn't do any more research into that area. That's information I don't need in my head.

The BLACKHAWK strip started in MILITARY COMICS (which changed to MODERN COMICS after the war), and UNCLE SAM became BLACKHAWK with the ninth issue (so there's no use looking for the first eight issues of BLACKHAWK, eh?). It was mostly a serious, downbeat, even pessismistic strip. Blackhawk himself was a former Polish pilot who organized a squad of volunteers from countries which had been overrun by the Nazi war machine. There was Hendrickson (Dutch), Stanislaus (a fellow Pole), Andre (French)and Olaf from Sweden. Chuck was an American, I don't know what he was doing there unless he just wanted to fight the Nazis and couldn't serve in US forces for some reason. Then there was Chop-Chop from China. He was the comic relief you saw with other Golden Age characters like Doiby Dickles, Woozy Winks, Ebony and Etta Candy and as such he was grotesque. The fact that he was Chinese makes his gruesome depiction racist, but he fits right in with the white sidekicks.

Anyway, the Blackhawk team fought Nazis and Japanese forces until the war ended. Then they switched to fighting Communism, and the stories hardly changed. Except for swastikas, the enemy wore red stars. Then as the Silver Age started, Blackhawk went from the defunct Quality group to be published by DC, which meant aliens, giant monsters, bizarre transformations over and over. By 1967, BLACKHAWK had cancellation hovering overhead and a last-ditch effort turned the grizzled veterans into garish costumed super-heroes.

Blackhawk himself remained Blackhawk, which made sense as he had always been a no-nonsense, single-minded slave driver from the first strip. Chuck became a communication expert called the Listener, and wore a jumpsuit decorated with little pink ears all over it. Yes. I couldn't make this stuff up. Olaf became the Leaper in a super-bouncy rubber suit that looked like the Michelin Man. Hendrickson and Andre became the Weapons Master and M'Sieu Machine, or something like that, using gadgetry. Chop-Chop wore metal gloves and was now Dr Hands. These all seemed like super-hero identities cooked up by the editor and writer over a quick lunch.

The only "new" Blackhawk that was halfway decent was Stan, who stripped the armor off a dead villain and put it on. (Ick, if you ask me. I hope that's not where he got all his clothes.) The Golden Centurion was obviously an imitation of Iron Man. Flight, enhanced strength, armored protection. Instead of energy blasts, though, the Golden Centurion sprayed his foes with a stream of liquid gold that hardened on them. Where was he getting all this gold? How much did it cost? You'd think Blackhawk would say, "Hey, Stan, spray these lead bricks for me, okay pal?"

Anyway, this phase didn't last long. In their final couple of issues, the team had their costumes and weaponry destroyed by a sneak attack. They went back to the dark blue military uniforms and fighting skills that had served them well for decades. The Blackhawks have been revived any number of times since then, sometimes in well-done stories and sometimes in trashy sleaze. But those issues of MILITARY COMICS and BLACKHAWK still exist, safely beyond the reach of meddling and revisionism.

A lot of actors have no grievance with being typecast. If they have a certain physical look or type of voice that lends itself perfectly to a type of role -- and if that role turns up frequently enough that they can make a living playing it-- they'll just go with it. B movies and TV series need large amounts of sympathetic judges, worried doctors, no-nonsense generals, hypertense editors, nosy neighbors... the list goes on, and many actors spend their careers comfortably showing up with their lines memorized and getting a paycheck.




Of the two actors here, Johnny Weismuller (on our right) started as an award-winning swimmer who lucked into the Tarzan role for MGM and made it his own. He didn't spend years doing summer stock or learning stagecraft in off-Broadway shows, and when he grew too fat errr mature for Tarzan, he shifted over to the Jungle Jim series for a few more years in front of the camera. (Now, I'll watch cheesy movies until they make me constipated, but I draw the line at the Jungle Jim franchise; they're below the minimum entertainment I need to keep watching. When you see the same stock animal footage shown twice within a few minutes, it's too sad.)

Next to Johnny is, of course, George Reeves. Now, he was a different story. He paid his dues as an actor, working through dozens of small parts in big movies and big parts in small movies. Yet now, when you're sitting through an old flick on Turner Classic Movies with Jimmy Cagney or Tyrone Power, and George Reeves walks onscreen.. well, he IS Superman. Those voice, the face, the expressions, it's just hopeless. If he had lived on to grow a bit older and establish himself in different roles (the usual method for fighting typecasting is to take a diametrically opposite role), he might have gone on to a comfortable career and later in life be interviewed about those old days as the Man of Steel. But we know that did not come to pass.

One of the alltime greats from Golden Age newspaper strips. Maybe not quite up there with Hal Foster or Alex Raymond, but breathing down their necks (in a metaphoric sense).